You're Amelia!
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.

HP, You Assholes!

I have a new Compaq notebook, the hardware of which is quite good except for the battery life (which sucks) and the trackpad's habit of jumping every so often.  And it was cheap, so I can live with those minor points.

The software is mostly Microsoft, and is as you'd expect.  The delivery of that software, though, is all HP.  New HP, not Old HP. In other words, total crap.

HP is too cheap to provide install CDs with new computers, so they take up 8GB of my 80GB hard disk with a "recovery" partition... something that is really useful if what you are recovering from is a disk failure.*  Because it's a separate partition, you can't recover the space even after you've taken the two hours or so to burn the recovery DVDs (plural).

And because it's so important (because you don't have install disks), it's protected from normal access, so you can't install software from it.  So HP put another 4.5GB of files on your C drive for actually installing from.

Even if you burn the recovery DVDs, you have no options whatsoever on reinstallation; you get the recovery partition back whether you like it or not.  I'd just blow the whole mess away and install standard Windows XP, except that I just replaced the drive with a 160GB model, and the XP install CDs I have are all pre-SP1 and won't recognise it.  I have three valid, unused activation keys, but they're useless.

Now, the one saving grace, I thought, was that HP had generously bundled 30 little games with the system, things like Bejeweled and Insaniquarium.  Nice touch, I thought, even though they're probably paying 20 cents for the lot (if that).

Turns out they are timed demos.  You get 60 minutes of play, then they die.  Yeah, way to go HP.  1.2GB of frigging ads.

Update: It would appear that at some point I had the presence of mind to make an... archival backup... of a certain piece of software to which I already hold multiple licenses.  Yay me.

* This is just an example; the disk didn't actually fail.  It was just full.  Not least because the 80GB disk comes with about 50GB of available space.  So I bought myself a 160GB replacement and a neat little 2.5" USB/eSATA drive case.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:38 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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6011 items, 158.6 days, 106.75 GB

Hey, my C drive is full.  How did that happen?

And why the hell doesn't Windows support symbolic links?  Yes, I know that it has symbolic links, I'm saying, why doesn't it support them, instead of doing things like this:

Explorer will delete the contents under your symlink when you delete the symlink. Restoring the symlink from the Recycle Bin does not restore the deleted data. But below the volume threshold, Explorer does not delete the target's data, but flags it invisibly for final deletion! This means you can delete a symlink, and then still use the data formerly under it, until you empty the Recycle Bin. Then the contents of the targeted folder will vanish. There is no warning about this behavior.

Ick.

Does iTunes at least allow me to change my directory?  Yes.  +1 for Apple, -1 for Microsoft.  Now I just have to copy 137 GB of music and podcasts across to my shiny new 500GB drive... And then buy another shiny new 500GB drive, because THIS ONE'S FULL.

At least they're cheap - prices on 500GB drives have plummeted the last few months.  Back in November I specified 320GB drives for some new servers because the 500GB were two-and-a-half times the price; now I can get a 500 for what I paid for those 320's. 

Oh, and part of the reason it's full is that I've been moving stuff off my 3x200GB spanned volume on my Windows box, because I don't trust Windows not to break it, and I don't need to do that now that 500GB drives are so cheap.  I don't accumulate data quite that fast.

Update: And -5 points to Apple for creaing an application that, when you change the directory it uses, still assumes that all your files are in the old directory, and provides no clear way to do anything about it.  There are workarounds, but the workaround provided by Apple only works if you do it before you move the files, which is... unhelpful.  The workaround that worked involved hand-editing the XML file iTunes generates and then deliberately corrupting the binary database, causing a database rebuild - and then manually re-importing the XML file as well.

At least, I think it worked.

Update: And then manually re-importing some lost directories, and then re-subscribing to my podcasts, only two of which tried to download all the old episodes again...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:01 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Eeeevil!

Windows Update just croaked both my desktop and my notebook.  I've spent the past hour in the Windows XP Repair thingy.

That little yellow blippy can sit there forever as far as I'm concerned.  In fact, hey, c'mere.  Automatic Updates Off.  Little red blippy Always Hide.

Much better.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:43 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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That's Just Wrong

Invader Zim slash fanfic?

Eww.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Bloody Internet Explorer!

Won't someone just kill it?

Thanks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:23 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Got A Grub

Pray, does it boot?

Nnnnot really.

WELL, IT'S HARDLY A BLOODY BOOT LOADER, IS IT?!!???!!?

Look, if you go to my brother's computer shop in Padstow, he'll replace the operating system for you.

---

Okay, so after all that, it just sits there saying GRUB. Remarkable boot loader, GRUB. Beautiful plumage.

I don't think it liked booting from a software mirror for some reason. FC5 was perfectly happy with it. CentOS 4.4, on the other hand, promptly joined the bleedin' choir invisible.

---

Excuse me, this is irrelevant, isn't it?

Yeah, well it's not easy to pad these Python files out to 150 lines, you know.

See also: This.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:32 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Mister Pointy

Quad Opteron.

4GB of memory.

One 250GB SATA drive.

Who specced this thing?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:55 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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AAAARGH!!

Before you make major changes to a system that is in daily use by over a hundred people, it is generally advisable to tell the person who has to support it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:19 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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AAARGH!

I got home this evening to discover that there'd been a blackout while I was away, and all the computers had shut down. So I power them all back up, and the Linux boxes seem to come up (even the broken one - see comments to previous post). But not the Windows box. Oh no. It won't even try to boot. I put the Knoppix CD in, and it doesn't seem to like that either.

I want to check on the Linux boxes, but I normally access those via SSH, either from my Windows box - which is dead - or from my Notebook - which might as well be dead, since after I got it back from "repair", where it was wiped and reinstalled, I wiped it and reinstalled it again, whereupon it promptly went back to its crashy ways so that I never managed to install any sort of useful software on it.

So I have:

One Linux box which has the best part of two terabytes of fansubbed anime on it, and which I can now ping, and that's about it.
One Linux box which was working fine right up until I tried to do a backup, whereupon it developed a severe case of FRUDS.*
One Windows box which will not boot, apparently, from anything.
One Windows notebook which is just about capable of playing a round of Minesweeper between reboots. If you choose the smallest game area.

At least when that iTunes upgrade destroyed my boot drive I had a mostly-working notebook. (And a good thing too, because it took two weeks to recover from that one.)

Right now - just so you know - right now I am typing this on a screen running at 800x600 in 16 colours. I managed to boot into Windows repair mode (which is crappy, but not completely useless) and repair the boot drive to a bootable state, but along the way it ate half my drivers. Which was fun when it came to trying to get networking working again.

Oh, and my old DVD combo drive has gotten stuck the way my CD burner did. Just plain will not open.

Dum de dum.

I should have a video driver in another five minutes or so.

De dum...

The disk drives seem to have survived, mostly.

La la la...

Why don't Nvidia have an Australian mirror, dammit? This would take 30 seconds from my ISP's FTP server.

Dee dee dee...

iTunes does not work in 16 colour mode. Seriously. It's unuseable. You just get this overlay of text on your previous application. No buttons, no window borders, nothing.

Doo doo doo...

And when the text is in Japanese but the character set is screwed up so that it shows random gibberish, this doesn't really do you much good at all.

97%... 98%... 99%... Ping!

Install install install. Oh, now I get to reboot. How sweet!

So I tell iTunes - which is running, of course - yes, fuck off, I really want to reboot right now, and then wander off to the bathroom, and when I get back I have a Windows desktop with no applications.

Now it clearly hasn't rebooted, because (a) it didn't have the time and (b) it should be at the login screen, not at the desktop. So I go Start->Shutdown->Restart, and off it goes.

And doesn't come back. It won't boot.

So I put the Windows CD back in, and while it's booting I go into the kitchen to make some dinner, and when I come back it's gone straight into recovery mode and is asking which installation I want to log in to, the options being (1) C:\Windows, and nothing else. So I press Enter.

And this being Microsoft, and Microsoft having the user-interface design sense of a dead bug, it reboots.

Now while I was waiting for the video driver to download I was at least able to SSH in to my Linux boxes and restart the DNS and proxy and file servers and stuff, so at least at this point I can go and try the notebook and maybe at least bring up a web page. Which I do, while Windows crawls back toward its suckovery mode.

And I run another chkdsk, and naturally it finds some more errors, and then I reboot again, and Windows comes up.

Still in 800x600, 16 colours.

I will cut short the next hour and a half of screwing around, of uncounted reboots and failed driver installs. Needless to say, I am still at 800x600, 16 colours. A little surprisingly, I have had no further problems with rebooting, which is a good thing considering how many times I have had to do so.

The situation is, as far as I can tell, this: I have an Nvidia 6600GT. It was working perfectly this morning, as it has done every day since The Sims 2 was released.** I have the latest drivers installed.

Windows chooses not to use it. It says, not entirely helpfully, this:

This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)

If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system.

Click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter for this device.

I have disabled every non-essential device. (Ignoring the fact that it all worked this morning.) I have scoured the interweb, and learned that this can be caused by problems with the motherboard drivers. I have installed the latest drivers, since it appeared that I was running a very old version. This required three attempts and three reboots, and has not resolved the problem, or, as far as I can tell, done anything at all.

The troubleshooter is as helpful as ever; that is to say, not in the slightest.

What I can do at this point is open the case, take out the current boot disk, put in the new 320GB disk, put the current boot disk in the external case, reinstall everything from scratch, and copy all my files back again, having had a working computer for just over two months this time round.

Or I could heave the damned thing out the window and take up basket-weaving. Two problems with that: First, I don't know how to weave baskets, and don't expect that I'd make much money at it even if I learned; second, I live on the ground floor.

Oh, and iTunes has apparently decided that my iPod is broken and wants to wipe it clean and rebuild it.

The iPod itself is working just fine, except that I can no longer update it.

I was going to write a short post about that, but then I found a more interesting topic.

But until I can resolve this, I can't listen to any new episodes of the Penn Jillette show on my way to work.

Update: Aha!

My notebook crashes if you ask it to do anything involving I/O or heavy processing, but the screen works.

My desktop works fine except for the display being stuck in 1986.

Remote Desktop! I get everything except for ClearType. I'll live.

Update: Aha part two! Too many USB drives means that the iPod collided with one of my network drives. When that happens, iTunes goes insane. I mean, what else would it do? Going into Disk Management and changing my iPod to drive A sorted that out. Of course, it's now completely blank, but that just means I leave it to sync overnight.

I hope.

Update: Actually, changing it to drive A seemed to drive iTunes insane. Insaner. Changing it to drive Z, though, that did the trick.

And running iTunes over Remote Desktop is an education in itself.

* Frequent random unlogged death syndrome.

** My old ATI 9600XT crashed when I ran The Sims 2, which necessitated a sudden upgrade.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:28 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Why?

I needed a small server for a project I was working on with another company. They said no problem, they'd either find one or buy one and send it to me.

It arrived today.

It's a quad Opteron.

It doesn't have a CD-ROM drive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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